Featured Show Gardens
Fleming’s and Trailfinder’s Australian Garden presented by Melbourne, Victoria
Garden in the Silver Moonlight
Awards
This garden was awarded
Gold
Dato K T
I Dream, I Seek my Garden
Designer: Shao Fan
Contractor: Peter Dowle Plants and Gardens
Sponsor: K T Wong Charitable Trust
This garden is inspired by the desire to introduce an original modern Chinese garden to audiences in the west, to link China and Europe.
The garden is sunk 1.5m (5ft) into the ground and represents a traditional Chinese interpretation of the landscape as depicted within Chinese art. The interpretation is modern, yet maintains the cultural symbolism of the garden.
In keeping with the ‘Literati’ aesthetic of renouncing worldly temptations and other material and social obligations, this garden seeks to calm the mind and spirit of the observer. Therefore, the planting reflects the qualities of simplicity and natural rusticity that is sought after in a Scholar’s Garden.
Each plant or tree has been chosen for its individual beauty and unique characteristics most admired by the literati scholars. Bright and flamboyant plants and planting are naturally eschewed in a space that seeks to be a retreat or refuge from society.
The plants are indigenous Chinese plants, but many are also considered to be European garden plants. Many of the choices have medicinal qualities that have been described in the Chinese Canon of Medicine and the cultural symbolism of the plants is of paramount importance.
Key plants include pine, fragrant Osmanthus, bamboo, tree peonies, Hemerocallis minor (syn. H. graminea), waterlilies, Liridodendron, Spiraea, trilliums, grasses, ferns and naturalised orchids.